“Thing they said.”

—Person who said it

After years of tweaking, I’ve got a setup for playing video games in my living room, from my couch, that I’m pretty happy with. So I wanted to write it down, as notes for when I inevitably need to set it up again, and in case someone has the same goals I do.

Goals

I have some pretty basic goals for playing games. I’m not competitive about it, my husband and I just like to play RPGs and narrative-driven games, and occasionally I’ll pick up a strategy game or visual novel game. We’re not big on online multiplayer, and try to avoid it. I already have a job, I don’t need an(other) unpaid one. And online games always end up being a job in at least one of two ways: they’re either filled with people who sink way more time into the game than you do, wrecking the challenge curve for you, or they’re games you need to coordinate with friends to play together. Syncing schedules is work. I’m not about that life.

I’m also, put mildly, uncultured swine, and don’t appreciate the finer things in life. By which I mean, I’m pretty tolerant of lower framerates, loss of audio quality, and loss of video quality. To an extent. I’m not immune to it, but from what I gather, I’m less sensitive to it than some of my friends.

Also, hardware lock-in annoys me. We love our games for their stories, and sometimes you want to revisit a story. We were big PlayStation gamers for a while, and then the PS3 dropped support for PS2 games, and then the PS4 came out without support for PS3 games. So for a hot minute, we had three generations of PlayStations sitting in our entertainment center. That’s silly. And yes, we could and did get the remastered versions of games, but that’s not a full solution for two reasons: first, we want to buy a game once, not every hardware cycle. Our game library should grow over time, not get reset every time a new hardware cycle spins up. Second, not every game got a remaster. Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, and the Mass Effect trilogy are still not available on PS4. We love those games, we want to revisit them, but it’s silly that they need what is essentially a dedicated console to be played.

Finally, gaming is a social experience for me. I don’t want to go sit in a room, by myself, and play a game. I know it sounds silly, but I’ve been living with my husband for 7 years now, and I… still like him? I still want to hang out and spend time with him? Some of the earliest moments of our relationship were me watching him play Skyrim and making fun of how bad he is at it. (Ethan is comically bad at video games, it’s very charming.) We like hanging out in the same room, even if we’re doing our own thing. He’ll browse social media on his phone while I play a game; when we find the rare couch co-op game we can play together, we’ll play together. So I want to play from my couch, on my TV, with the speakers and the Hue lights and my husband sitting next to me; I don’t want to be sitting in a computer chair at a desk.

So obviously, we picked up PC gaming. Our game collection now is only additive, and we can bring it forward as our hardware improves. We can find most games on PC. We can even find some DRM-free. I don’t worry too much about the details or optimize anything, because I don’t care to fiddle with it. I just buy whatever hardware Dylan tells me to, and don’t overclock anything, and that approach seems to be working fine for me. My general rule of thumb is I buy from GOG when possible, because it’s DRM-free; Steam when something’s not available on GOG, because it has the largest selection and best integration with Steam Link, and Epic or Origin when I… well, when the game isn’t available anywhere else.

To get that couch experience we wanted, we use Steam Link, which lets you play your games on your PC, but displays them on a different device. It’s pretty neat, and it also means that our games are now no longer limited to a single room; we can have a setup in a few rooms, and play on whichever makes sense. For example, our living room has one setup, I put another in our rec room, and I can also stream games to my laptop wherever I am. That flexibility appeals to me.

The Hardware

I’m using Raspberry Pi 3s to power the Steam Link. My house has CAT6 cable run through the walls, so I get a good connection on them. They output to the TVs via HDMI (through an A/V receiver in the living room). I keep a keyboard and mouse with them, because despite my best efforts, that still seems to be required, though I can get away with using them infrequently. I specifically chose a bluetooth keyboard and mouse that came with a dongle; pairing and unpairing is annoying, so the dedicated dongle makes life easier, everything just always connects.

I’m using a Dualshock 4 as my controller. I tried the XBox Wireless Controller and got weird glitches; phantom or laggy joystick controls, if I remember right. I also tried the Steam controller, because we picked one up for $5, but I just can’t deal with the touchpad right joystick thing. It’s pretty bad, and playing anything that requires some accuracy with it is basically impossible. The Dualshock 4, though, works like a charm. The only problem I had was it would randomly disconnect on me, and I’d have to reconnect the controller. Not ideal. I have a sneaking suspicion this is because the Raspberry Pi’s bluetooth antenna is underpowered, because a $7 bluetooth dongle fixed it for me. Now it works like a charm. It lasts for at least several hours of active use; I can’t tell you more about battery life than that, because we always just place it back on a charging cradle after using it. It hasn’t run out of battery on us yet? One thing that was tricky was figuring out how to turn off the controller when you’re done with the game, because it won’t turn off automatically when you stop streaming Steam. Just hold the PS button for like 10 seconds; it’ll power down, and reconnect automatically when it turns back on.

The Software

We’re using Raspbian Buster on our Pis, with the official Steam Link app. I disabled bluetooth and wireless, as we’re getting bluetooth from the dongle and wireless isn’t necessary when we’re using Ethernet (and I don’t want it accidentally getting used).

To get 5.1 surround sound working using HDMI, I had to tweak some configs. Something something insert notes here on how I did that.

Insert notes on starting Steam Link at launch.

To disable the screen blanking, I installed xscreensaver, then disabled the screensaver using it. Seems to have worked just fine.

The Results

We now have a setup that lets us buy games once, and upgrade the hardware running the games without losing our library in the process. Any games that don’t rely on a server we’ll be able to play for the foreseeable future. We leave the Pis running, and when we switch to their inputs, we see the Steam Link interface, ready to connect, controllable by the Dualshock 4. If the Pi isn’t on, when it boots up, it’ll automatically launch the Steam Link interface. We can play from our couch, with minimal keyboard/mouse usage necessary, and maybe 50% of the time not necessary at all. Only general purpose computers are used for all of this, meaning when I have a bad idea, I can write software that can run on any machine involved. I can also debug and dig through any of the machines involved.

What’s Next

The next big upgrade I want for this system is to switch the Pi 3s to Pi 4s. Better processors, 4GB of RAM, 4K HDR support, and a gigabit connection sounds nice. And when I do, I want to add a PoE hat to the Pis, so they don’t even need a power cable, they can just draw power from their Ethernet connection. One less cord is always a win.

I miss my Share button actually recording video. It usually gets mapped to something else when used for Steam Link, but my graphics card has support for PS4-like recording and capturing of pictures. I miss using it. So I’d like to figure out a way to start doing that stuff again. I have some hare-brained schemes about bluetooth buttons that daemon processes on the Pi listen for so they can signal server processes on the Windows machine, which will simulate the keypresses for capturing video or screenshots. But that particular bad idea will have to wait for another day.